Slideshow: Intel Beats ARM Servers

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Intel announced an impressive second-generation Atom-based server SoC and benchmarks showing it beats ARM-based chips from Applied Micro, Calxeda, and Marvell. The 64-bit C2000, aka Avoton, is designed into more than 50 systems, months ahead of a flood of 64-bit ARM-based parts expected from as many as a dozen competitors in 2014.

All the SoCs aim to deliver new levels of performance-per-watt for power-constrained data centers. Although Intel is winning kudos today, OEMs say they will use both Atom- and ARM-based chips in a diversifying set of servers on their road maps.

For example, Hewlett-Packard announced the Moonshoot Proliant M300 server, packing up to 45 eight-core Avotons in a 4.3 U-sized chassis. It delivers seven times the performance and six times the performance/watt of systems built on Centerton, Intel's first-generation Atom server SoC, said Gerald Kleyn, director of platform engineering for hyperscale systems at HP.

HP claims it had "good success" selling Centerton servers to "several customers," and expects the market for the so-called microservers will grow with Avoton. HP was among the first to test the 32-bit ARM-based Calxeda server SoCs, and it already has "64-bit ARM chips running in HP's labs," Kleyn said.

In April HP launched its Moonshoot chassis as a CPU-agnostic box that will hold a wide variety of processors, possibly including ARM-based SoCs from partners AMD, Applied Micro, Calxeda, and Texas Instruments, as well as FPGA accelerator cards.

HP created a server lab in Houston where partners and users can develop and test out the products. "Clearly there's a software ecosystem that needs to come together, but we're really encouraged by the progress we've seen," he said.

Intel is also shipping Rangeley, an embedded version of Avoton sporting accelerator blocks targeted at networking systems, such as routers, switches, and line cards. In addition, it gave a demonstration of its silicon photonics interconnects for data center racks delivering up to 1.6 Tbit/s over 300 meters using a new MCX connector and ClearCurve optical fiber developed with Corning. Related to the new interconnects, Intel will work with Microsoft on a next-generation design for racks in its data centers.

Intel got Avoton design wins with traditional customers such as Advantech, Dell, NEC, Quanta, Supermicro, and WiWynn. It also won sockets in blade-based switches at Ericsson.

The following pages provide more details about Avoton and its performance against ARM-based SoCs.

Avoton is certainly an improvement on the ridiculously slow and inefficient Centerton, but it is not as efficient as ARM chips. The 40nm Calxeda server node uses 6-7W in total including DRAM and interconnect, while 4C Avoton starts at 13W - that's only for the CPU, not the DRAM and interconnects...

Calxeda will move to 28nm with their next generation in a few weeks and 20nm next year. Then there is AMCC with X-Gene, AMD with Hierofalcon, NVidia with Denver - all having 8 and 16-core 64-bit ARM server chips to be released in 2014 and 2015. It looks like Avoton will end up in the exact same situation as Atom is today.

Any attempt of Calxeda to server market is just now truncated, Avoton is clearly a winner in the perf/watt parameter and this will be good even for 20nm planar Calxeda socs. Not a chance, once Calxeda will shift to A57 the power consumption will grow like a hell.

Moreover there is a 16 core Intel Soc in Q3/2014, bye bye competitors.

The Avoton is a 34 X 28 mm2 package, and the photo seems to indicate the die is about 1/10 (~1/3 X 1/3) of that so I estimate now about 100 mm2 for Avoton, which would be about 4x the years ago die size of Atom Silverthorne. At that time the package was as small as 13 X 14 though it was often 22 X 22.

I seriously doubt Intel can beat ARM on perf/W. AnandTech showed several 6W Calxeda nodes beating low power Xeon CPUs on performance as well as perf/Watt. Next-gen 28nm Calxeda nodes based on A15 will be available in a few weeks, and should improve performance as well as perf/W further.

So Intel can only win by comparing not-yet-released 22nm chips with 40nm ones which have been shipping for a year...

And the real like for like comparison will be next year with 64-bit Cortex-A57 on 20nm. A57 is significantly faster than A15 and reaches far higher frequencies as well.

Actually, performance per watt is probably more important to a degree to the server market than cost. Keep in mind that power is an ongoing expense while you only pay once for the chip - at least until Intel and the other chip companies can figure out a way to lease them...

Also, the CPU chip cost is only one component of the cost for a server, both in terms of dollars and watts. Do we know how different a server board BOM cost is between ARM and x86? Likewise, is the only significant power usage difference between those server boards the CPU itself?

There's no doubt that Intel can beat ARM when using performance per Watt as a metric. However traditionally ARM beats Intel on cost. So in devices where best performance is not the goal (smartphones, tablets e.t.c) ARM won and will continue to win because of its lower cost.

It will be interesting to see who wins on the server front. Performance is obviously more crucial in servers....But the cost metric is also just as important.